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All’s well that ends well? Assessing the portrayal of diversity in today’s BBC

Published onOct 28, 2024
All’s well that ends well? Assessing the portrayal of diversity in today’s BBC

This paper discusses how people and communities of colour are portrayed by the BBC. While it scrutinises portrayal, it also considers how the BBC does not portray ethnic communities and why this is important in contemporary journalism. The Morrison- Banatvala review’s scope (BBC Media Centre 2024) is limited to the period between April 2023 and March 2024. With that in mind, this paper aims to suggest solutions to the challenges the corporation faces to win back the trust of those who are disappointed by the defensive posturing of BBC senior leaders when they make editorial and human errors. The critique concludes by stating that, when it comes to portrayal, while the BBC tries to uphold excellence, its employees are being let down by editorial leaders who are wedded in ‘group think’.

Key words: BBC, communities of colour, representation, bias

Historical context

The BBC first represented communities of colour in a meaningful way during the period of mass immigration to the UK in the 1960s, setting up an ‘Immigrants’ programmes unit’ in 1965 (Hendy 2019a). But it has been in dispute with itself since then over the issue of portrayal. For years it defended the right to air The black and white minstrel show, which began in 1958 and drew in audiences of 16 million (Hendy 2019b). By the mid-1980s, the BBC finally realised it had a serious lack of minority ethnic employees, and it set about trying to rectify this situation with various trainee schemes (Dimbleby 2022).

Without realising it until much later, I was part of that push to recruit people of colour to mainstream journalism as part of the local radio trainee scheme in 1986. Four of the 12 of us were of colour, and today only one remains in a staff position, and he is the face of the Ten O’Clock news. Two of my colleagues left the day after we ‘graduated’, citing racism as the main reason. I Ieft after 24, mainly happy and fulfilling years. Of course, the BBC could be frustrating. You had to understand the rules of the game, play by a set of political rules as in any hierarchical institution, something I was never good at, daring to speak my mind and branded a maverick, which to this day I wear as a badge of honour.

Fortunately, Radio 4 has continued to employ me as a freelance presenter of Pick of the week, and since 2021, the station commissioned five documentaries on issues affecting South Asian communities. There is little doubt that the BBC is committed to fairer racial representation, and it is much more representative of the audiences and communities it serves than when I joined. But it has so much more to do. Sadly, having spoken to scores of current minority employees, I am of the view that the BBC’s improvements are window-dressing and do not go far enough (Choudhury 2022a, 2022b). If we examine racial diversity, in particular, over the past 40 years, we will find peaks and troughs. This review is a chance to change and restore faith among licence fee-payers of colour – something we should never forget: the brown and black pound must be equivalent to the white pound. To do that, we need to tell unpalatable truths, acknowledge errors and embrace the opportunity afforded us here, without the corporation’s default defensive position or ‘swatting-inconvenient-problems-away’ attitude when employees raise questions or complain officially (Choudhury 2023).

Contemporary BBC

In October 2018, the BBC published its report on the socio-economic diversity of its staff (BBC 2018). It concluded that ‘the socio-economic diversity of the BBC workforce is not representative of the UK population’. The report revealed that the corporation employed almost three times the number of staff (17 per cent) who went to independent schools compared to the national average (7 per cent). This produced a shift in focus, and the media regulator pressured the BBC to prioritise social class above all things (Ofcom 2023). Up until the 2018 report, the corporation had concentrated on increasing its numbers from communities of colour. The former director-general, Greg Dyke, started this move almost 20 years previously, when he described the BBC as ‘hideously white’ (BBC News 2001). The following year Dyke committed the BBC to making sure the workforce was racially representative (BBC 2002).

The then-director-general used a figure which was a decade out of date to set his target of 10 per cent, which it never reached during his or his immediate successor’s tenure. The 2021 UK census noted that 18.3 per cent of people in England and Wales described themselves as non- white (ONS 2022). Before the Office for National Statistics revealed this increase, the current director-general, Tim Davie, in 2021, committed his organisation to make sure the workforce would hit 20 per cent when it came to ethnic minorities (BBC 2021). Only in 2023 did Davie put a date on when he expected that target should be reached – 2027-2028 (BBC 2023a). As of the 31 March 2023, the most recently published data on ethnicity, the BBC is at 17 per cent (BBC 2023b). Ethnic leadership is at 14 per cent. These figures would have been cause for optimism had it not been for five striking factors.

  1. The BBC takes leadership to mean anyone in Bands E to SL (senior leaders). The problem with this data is that it includes correspondents at regional and national level who do not have leadership responsibilities.

  2. Power lies with budgetary and recruitment control. Those at Band E do not have the power to spend money at their own discretion and neither do they have the authority to hire and fire. Even those at Band F, the ‘managing editor’ level, are bound by the direction set by senior leaders. One source told me that a manager was ostracised after going against a controller’s decision by appointing a breakfast presenter of colour at a city station (Anon 1 2024).

  3. At senior leader rank, across the whole of the BBC, the figure for minority ethnics stands at 10.3 per cent. The BBC does not publish senior leadership data in BBC News. But out-of-date figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act suggests that has never risen above 3 per cent in BBC News. In the history of the BBC, there has never been a senior editor of colour in any of the main radio or television sequence programmes, such as Today, World at One/PM, World this weekend, BBC 1’s One, Six and Ten and Newsnight. This is significant because these programmes are heard and watched by the country’s decision-makers and they set the news agenda.

  4. When we analyse BBC nations and regions, the figures are worse. As of 25 July 2024, no head of region is of colour. Not one single editor responsible for television or online is of colour. In local radio, just two of those heading the 39 stations are South Asian. None is African or Caribbean. At the time of writing, another mixed-race station manager (executive editor or former managing editor role) is on ‘other projects’ and not managing a station in a city where the majority is non-white. A white editor is in charge of Radio Leicester, a city with a 60 per cent non-white population, as are the managers in Radio Manchester and Radio Leeds. The situation gets even worse when you consider that in many of the stations with high ethnic minorities, the communities editor is white. The role is to get under the surface of his or her communities. Instead, according to sources I have spoken with, the person’s focus is spent on the ‘making a difference’ awards. As one source told me, this is an outdated idea which ‘had a place during COVID but is now a waste of time’ (Anon 2 2023). In local radio and regional television, there are some places where there is not a single person of colour on staff in newsrooms. It is shocking that this is the situation in Radio Leicester and BBC Radio Solent.

    5. The BBC trumpeted its decision to invest in investigation teams across England and Wales (BBC 2023c). It took almost 18 months to set up. Look closely at the hires and most of the teams are white and all the decision-makers are white. My prediction, based on experience and academic study, is that this initiative will provide stories which look through a predominantly white, male, European lens (see also Barling 2022). These units will not have the capacity, capability or confidence to find the hidden stories of communities of colour. The stories will be stereotypically what white editors think they know and understand about minority communities, rather than explore the changing face of Britain.

They will fail to tell the stories of how immigrants have embraced the British way of life and are more British than the British. How the children of immigrants are assimilating, not just integrating, and mixed marriages mean cultures are changing. How the communities are hanging on to the myths of the past. In other words, we are not capturing the authentic stories of our emerging island communities. This affects how history will record, analyse and eventually view the contribution of minority groups.

Let us consider some important but complex questions. How has South Asian culture affected contemporary music? What are the film tastes of Gen Z and how does that affect the influence of Bollywood? How does that differ from other generations? What would happen to the NHS if the UK clamped down on immigration and what are NHS trusts doing to shore up their workforce? How are the first, second and third generation of immigrants doing in keeping alive their culture and history? Why are today’s minority ethnic generation less interested in their past? What is the impact of their going away from the traditional STEM subject areas to arts and culture? How have parental attitudes changed among minority communities towards academic expectations of their offspring? Why have South Asians embraced sport as a career yet are still failing to make an impact in certain fields? How has leadership changed in terms of ethnicity in FTSE 100 companies? Why are we reliant on ethnic minorities from the US to fill our aspiration of creating racial equality when it comes to FTSE 100 chief executives? Why are pernicious practices, such as toxic misogyny and patriarchy, still being passed down through young South Asian men? What has been the impact of Rishi Sunak becoming the first prime minister of colour on South Asian communities in particular? Why are Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch and Priti Patel so anti-immigrant and denying a new generation of settlers what their parents were allowed to have? Why do people think that Cole Palmer is English, yet Bukayo Saka is not?

It is the lack of curiosity in the BBC and its failure to ask the right questions which disappoint communities of colour the most. One BBC employee said that every time they brought forward ideas, they were told it was ‘too difficult and time consuming’ (Anon 3 2023). In one case, a reporter was told their relative’s cancer ‘wasn’t sexy enough for TV’ (Anon 4 2023).

These points raise the question: how can the BBC hope to portray the communities it is meant to serve when the newsrooms are lacking people of colour and, even then, they are either in low ranks or freelances?

Let me explain why rank and status are important. It is a fact that employees who are junior and/or non-permanent are more likely to say nothing for fear of losing their jobs (Bang and Frith 2017). That, in turn, leads to ‘group think’ (Matusitz and Breen 2012).

Five case studies

This next section considers five case studies in the period the Morrison- Banatvala review is examining to highlight the arguments put forward in this paper. The two common themes in the first two examples are the lack of understanding on the impact of journalistic carelessness when it comes to lazy, potentially racist stereotypes and the BBC’s failure to acknowledge a problem. The latter should concern the inquiry team because it underlies a systemic problem of the consequences of not questioning or evolving editorial practices suitable for contemporary British audiences. Britain is no longer homogenous, and there are communities within communities. While no media outlet can be all things to all people, sensitivity in the portrayal of minority groups, brought about by embracing critical friends external to the BBC would be useful in gaining trust from different ethnic communities. It is worth remembering that most stereotypes have a basis in fact, but the caricatures become harmful over a period, unless they are actively challenged (Arendt 2023). The three other case studies are examples of opportunities missed, and how BBC News and Nations need to augment their coverage and portrayal of minority communities.

Nottingham killings

On 13 June 2023, a man killed two students and a school caretaker in Nottingham. Within hours police had arrested a suspect. This meant the case was legally active, and it was important that media outlets did not veer into the area of substantial risk of serious prejudice. This breaking news story made national headlines and BBC News had a live blog, devoting a substantial amount of time to this story on the News Channel. The Six came live from Nottingham. Quite right, because it was an important story. The next day BBC News published an article which said: ‘The BBC has been told by official sources the 31-year-old suspect was originally from West Africa but had been in the UK for “many years” and had settled status’ (Bevis et al. 2023) This raises one crucial question: why are the race and immigration status germane to this case? When I tried to raise the issue, the response from the online editor was one of dismissal rather than understanding.

The BBC also dismissed my subsequent complaint questioning why race and immigration status were important in this case. It responded:

In general, we refer to ethnicity, race or sexuality only where we believe there is a direct relevance to the case in hand or where this is specifically referenced in court or by the police as part of a witness appeal. Otherwise, we would not consider this a detail that should automatically be included in our reports. However, as the news emerged of the attacks on 13 June, there were a lot of developments happening. Also, it is sadly common in events of this nature that rumours and speculation circulate widely online (Hanna 2023).

In my view, this was the BBC doubling down on a misjudgement. It agreed that it would report race if it were relevant. It failed to acknowledge it revealed the details of ethnicity and immigration status after the suspect was arrested, and it did so the next day after the police indicated they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the killings. Further, BBC News breached the Contempt of Court Act 1981. Section five of the Act allows a ‘discussion of public affairs’ (Ministry of Justice 1991):

A publication made as or as part of a discussion in good faith of public affairs or other matters of general public interest is not to be treated as a contempt of court under the strict liability rule if the risk of impediment or prejudice to particular legal proceedings is merely incidental to the discussion.

I give the BBC the benefit of doubt that it acted ‘in good faith’, but it cannot deploy the ‘public interest’ defence. The suspect was in custody, the police did not need the public’s help to catch him, and nothing would be served by discussing the race and immigration status of the arrested man, other than to inflame passions and prejudice a future jury.

I accept that the BBC could use the defence of ‘fade factor’ (Thomas 2008) to reject a notion of contempt. It could also argue that, in the event, the defendant pleaded guilty to manslaughter (BBC News 2023a). This meant a judge heard the case without a jury, so contempt was never a possibility. But at the time of publication the BBC could not have known this. Further, the trial began a mere six months after the killings and the media, including the BBC, ran 40 stories before that admission, so it was fresh in the minds of potential jurors. My overarching questions remain: how did this add to the story and why were race and immigration status a significant detail apart from reinforcing the prejudices of those who believe that all criminals are of colour and do not belong in this country?

On 4 July, after following up my complaint, the BBC said:

It’s my understanding that this is information which was already in the public domain, having been reported that morning by some national newspapers. So it would not be unusual to confirm details already in the public domain about a developing news story, at a time when very little was known about the suspect and they raise questions likely to be in the mind of readers. I note you point to how other media outlets which didn’t report these details and mention ITV central [sic], although ITV did also report that the suspect is ‘originally from West Africa’, while their UK editor tweeted that this had been confirmed by several sources. As your complaint also refers to colour it’s worth making clear that we did not ourselves report that the suspect is black, although we quoted an eyewitness referring to a ‘black man’ and would do the same if eyewitnesses said they saw a white man (Moss 2023).

I have five responses to these points.

  • The BBC is very bad at admitting it can make errors of judgement, and it protests too much. It must be allowed to defend itself, but its logic is often flawed when it comes to the portrayal of communities of colour.

  • The BBC’s defence is that other outlets had printed details, so it had to do the same. That should not be the case. The question remains, why is it important to the BBC’s reporting?

  • The BBC appears to suggest it was doing a public service. This is quite a stretch, because we do not know what people really want to know. We can only use our judgement based on our own experiences, often clouded by our (unconscious) biases.

  • The BBC emphasises a social media post by ITV national’s UK editor without understanding that ITV Central was a local station, and it was the BBC’s regional team which posted the article citing the race and immigration status. It is worth pointing out that ITV Central went on to win the RTS national award for its coverage, where the judges praised its measured tone and criticised BBC East Midlands Today’s episodes of the same story. It is also worth noting that from 13 June onwards to date, Sky News, a newsroom full of former BBC journalists, did not mention either the race or immigration status (Parmenter 2023; Cotterill 2023).

  • The BBC appears to suggest that the word of one source is enough. Best journalistic practice is for at least two independent sources.

This raises another question and one which does require an answer. If a case were active, should we include material likely to prejudice a potential juror? Is it right that the BBC, one of the world’s most trusted news organisations, should apparently have a different set of rules when reporting on or portraying communities of colour? The BBC is, quite rightly, held to a higher standard because it is publicly funded. Just because media outlets are pursuing a line, it does not mean the BBC should, especially if it carries the possibility of feeding into negative stereotypes and demonising minority communities.

We need a comparator to explain how the BBC is not consistent in its portrayal of communities. On the same day as the killings, the same online team published a report on a woman murdering a pensioner. It did not mention or speculate about the race or immigration status of the woman arrested for murder (BBC News 2023). This is quite correct because neither detail is important to this story, just as the race and immigration status of the Nottingham killer played no part in why a man killed three innocent people in a random act of tragic madness. If you were to trawl the BBC News website for reports about criminals, when a person is white, the ethnicity and nationality are not given. The significance of this discrepancy, and why this lack of thought is important, is that readers have a negative perception of people of colour, believing they are the ones responsible for criminal acts (Hoffman 2018).

The BBC has continued in its practice of mentioning the immigration status when reporting court cases. Although this falls outside the scope of the Morrison-Banatvala review, the report in question was broadcast on the midnight bulletin on Radio 4 on 17/18 May 2024. It is significant because it highlights the lack of thought in writing and telling stories. The opening sentence was: ‘An asylum seeker from Morocco, who murdered a pensioner in Hartlepool and told police the attacks were in revenge for the war between Israel and Hamas, has been jailed for life.’ The implication here is that it was because he was an asylum seeker who was not British that he murdered a Briton. If the journalist had written: ‘A court has sentenced a man to life for the murder of a pensioner in Hartlepool.’ the story would still have had the same impact. This is important because the media demonises asylum seekers, and words are important (Peterie and Neil 2019).

Grooming gangs

This next example illustrates why BBC journalists should be aware of the dangers of misinformation, no matter how expert the source may appear. In their role of watchdogs, journalists are naturally wary of the veracity of statements from institutions (Hamada and Vallesi 2023), and they try to verify comments masquerading as fact (Luengo and García- Marín 2020). But the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg failed to either challenge or verify claims made by the former home secretary, Suella Braverman, concerning grooming gangs (Wells and Kuenssberg 2023). During the interview, Braverman said authorities were wilfully ‘turning a blind eye’ to grooming gangs because of political correctness. She continued that ‘vulnerable white girls living in troubled circumstances have been abused, drugged, raped, and exploited’ by networks of gangs of rapists, which were ‘overwhelmingly’ made up of British-Pakistani males. The following day, the then-Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, promoted the same myth (Crew and Symonds 2023). In 2020, the Home Office, of which Braverman was its political head, discredited the idea that grooming gangs were overwhelmingly Pakistani men (Home Office 2020). The BBC writers, one of whom is an expert in home affairs, buried that caveat in the final part of their story. The following day, Symonds wrote a more nuanced piece which questioned the prime minister’s and home secretary’s claims about the link between ethnicity and grooming gangs (Symonds 2023). Again, Symonds led his report with a justification of the connection. It was not until his 17th paragraph that he mentioned the Home Office report while his 19th and 20th sentences carried the crucial contexts, quoting from the report that:

  • ‘Research has found that group-based child sexual exploitation offenders are most commonly white.’

  • ‘Some studies suggest an over-representation of Black and Asian offenders relative to the demographics of national populations.’

I have two observations.

  1. In written journalism, writers deploy the ‘inverted pyramid’, where the importance of the information decreases with subsequent sentences (Schade 2018). Symonds and the online sub-editors know this and use this approach, even in analysis pieces. It raises a question – what was the new news line? Was it, as Symonds starts: ‘The prime minister says victims of grooming gangs have been ignored because of political correctness’? Or was it: ‘The home secretary is pandering to right-wing racists and putting South Asian lives in danger, MPs and experts have told Eastern Eye? (Choudhury 2023). The second question is why the BBC would not highlight the fact that Sunak’s and Braverman’s assertions had angered communities of colour – not just Muslims – for, once again, demonising minorities while letting majority white offenders off the hook?

  2. The damage had already been done the moment Braverman opened her mouth and Kuenssberg failed to challenge. For more than a decade, extreme right-wing individuals and groups have spread the idea that grooming gangs are ‘overwhelmingly’ Pakistani/Muslim men. This led to spikes in vitriol against minority communities (UK Values and Comment 2023). Studies show the link between racist rhetoric by politicians and hate crime (Burnett 2016; Murphy 2021). By not challenging, the BBC failed in its duty, causing harm and offence.

The questions which arose in my mind were why and how this error happened. Was it because of a lack of judgement? Could it have been poor planning or because a producer had failed to research potential answers to questions. The BBC’s programme of redundancies means many experienced journalists have left the corporation, leading to claims that hardly anyone ‘leaves the building or does any actual journalism’ (Turvill 2023). How much has this played into the lack of journalistic rigour?

Once again, the BBC failed to uphold my complaint against the Laura Kuenssberg programme, under section 5 of the Ofcom code, due accuracy (Greenwood 2023).

The next three case studies demonstrate opportunities missed when it comes to portraying minority communities.

Newsgathering

The BBC operates in a bubble of homogeneity when it comes to the reporting of communities of colour, resulting in reports which are ‘staid and unadventurous and populated predominantly by white middle-class males’ (Barling 2022). Its producers operate according to ‘professional pragmatics’ where they are constrained in the stories they are allowed to create and report (Cottle 1998). Further, academics argue that the corporation remains in a state of ‘post-colonial angst’ over how it should tackle and portray race (Ibrahim and Howarth 2020).

Schemes such as encouraging minority ethnic news media to use the BBC’s local democracy initiative are one way the corporation aims to ensure coverage of communities of colour (Tobbit 2020). But it is an opportunity wasted because it is one-way traffic which does not benefit the BBC. Publishers, such as Eastern Eye, use the service, yet the BBC apparently does not when it comes to stories which affect their minority audiences. What the BBC should realise is that issues which affect white people also touch the lives of minorities but in different and often disproportionate ways. The pandemic was a case in point. Eastern Eye first reported that black and Asian doctors and nurses were dying disproportionately compared to white health workers. The journal also revealed that South Asian communities were not taking up the offer of getting vaccinated (Choudhury 2021a). This led to the then-health secretary asking the newspaper to help it spread the word among the different communities (Choudhury 2021b).

Religious festivals

Fewer than half of the citizens of England and Wales describe themselves as Christian (Russell and Farley 2022). Examining the stories covered by BBC News online between April 2023 and March 2024, scores of them have different news angles concerning Christmas. For example, journalists reported on the impact on businesses (Collins 2023), on the cost of living crisis (Bilalova 2023) and international affairs (Lukiv 2023). Not one piece felt it needed to explain what Christmas was about. In contrast, reporting on the main South Asian religious festivals, Eid, Diwali, Navratri and Vaisakhi had a familiar pattern. Almost all felt the need, as in every year, to explain what the festival was, and the stories concentrated on the culture – such as dance, light switch-ons and numbers who gathered to celebrate (Issimdar 2023).

While new readers do need an explanation of a particular festival, the assumption appears to be that issues such as business, economics, education, crime, international politics and environment do not affect minority communities when it comes to religion. Even reporters of colour write about religion through a white lens. Several sources, too scared to be identified, said they had ‘to pitch stories in a way that editors understood, and this means picture-led with Muslims at prayers, Hindus dancing the raas garba and Sikhs ladling out food in gurudwaras’ (Anon 5 2024). This lack of intent in exploring beyond the superficial disappointed and deflated them, they said.

Big events and ‘special seasons’

Every year the BBC has opportunities to cover so-called ‘big events’. When it comes to these, planning and thinking outside the usual white audiences are crucial if the BBC is to succeed when it comes to the authentic and proper portrayal of minority communities. These include sport, politics, industrial action, supermarket recalls and sudden royal deaths.

Let us take football in England as an example. The problem is not one of coverage when it comes to the portrayal of South Asian fans – it is the prominence given to it. I have long argued that our role as journalists must be to bust myths and stereotypes – but we must demonstrate how we do so on prominent platforms. The BBC has a multitude of digital platforms, yet on radio and television it ignores or fails to portray South Asians, in particular, as fans of the ‘beautiful game’. Content analysis of BBC Radio Manchester’s coverage in the run-up to the FA Cup Final between the city’s two sides in 2023 revealed that the station failed to engage with its South Asian fans (Jameson 2023). Contrast this with ITV’s take on fans in Manchester (Lal 2023).

The stereotypical view is that all football fans are white, but that is not true. Manchester City Football Club understand that and celebrated their contribution to the club’s fan base two months after the FA Cup Final (Kelsey 2023). This is because football clubs know the bottom line is that South Asian fans bring in revenue – exemplifying the business case for diversity. Indeed, clubs are making a big effort to embrace their South Asian fan base and those involved in some capacity in the game (Thompson 2022). Yet we hear little about that in the BBC’s coverage. The Morrison-Banatvala review’s terms of reference are portrayals across all genres, but news and sport have a distinctive set of challenges because news judgement and experience are the main keys to output and delivery. I recommend that BBC senior executives carry out research into the specific reasons and ways it covers news and sport when it comes to communities of colour, with the paper by Rehman and Jebril (2023) as a possible starting point.

The year under review also saw the coronation of King Charles. As with the death of the Queen Elizabeth II, the overwhelming coverage features white men and women (BBC News 2023b). Indeed, while the BBC has made huge strides in racial representation on stories, it fails too often to think outside the box, plan properly or truly create content which is other than superficial and inauthentic.

Although this is outside the date scope of the Morrison-Banatvala review, this year’s general election is another case in point of the BBC failing to demonstrate the changing face of Britain. With the exception of one television report (Maqbool 2024a), and a Radio 4 documentary (Choudhury 2024), BBC News failed to mention or understand how this election would interest or impact South Asian voters. Even local radio, which should be the first starting point on any community story since it is supposed to be at the grassroots, did not shine. Radio Leicester, in a city where 60 per cent are non-white, with a high percentage of Muslims, relied on network news to tell the story of how Gaza would impact on the election (Maqbool 2024b). What is equally disappointing is that the report was broadcast 10 days after it initially aired on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. Moreover, the example of Leicester raises a fundamental question: if local radio and regional television fail to portray their communities of colour, what hope is there for the wider BBC?

What the BBC does very well, when it commissions them, are ‘special seasons’ such as the one on the 75th anniversary of Windrush (BBC 2023d). It is clear that the BBC ploughs substantial planning and resources into creating content which is potentially award-winning. Yet it raises the question whether this filters through to news desks when the content relates to non-white stories. Are programme journalists missing the potential for unusual human-interest stories in favour of churnalism and stereotypical stories which white editors think are of interest to white audiences?

Although the BBC remains one of the most trusted news services globally, it still has a problem with the perception that it remains ‘white, middle class and London-centric’ (Nielsen et al. 2023). What communities of colour want is the same level of prominence for stories which affect them as is given to white licence-fee payers. One of the biggest complaints often repeated by people of colour was echoed by the broadcaster and former head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, Sir Trevor Phillips. He labelled BBC Two ‘Britain’s whitest terrestrial television station’ and claimed ‘people of colour are paying a hundred and fifty pounds a year for the upkeep of services that actually do not serve them’ (Whittingdale 2016).

Recommendations

The BBC started to monitor ethnicity in 1983 (Choudhury 2022). But staff and expert observers have criticised the corporation for the lack of viable data to analyse progress (Albury 2019). Insiders have told me that ‘diversity monitoring became a box-ticking exercise from the moment it was introduced’ (Anon 7 2024). The BBC does trumpet its achievements (BBC Media Centre 2023) and, as you would expect from a press office, it does spin its good news. For example, I used the Freedom of Information Act to request details of how commissioners monitor diversity in independent production companies. It could have been open and transparent. Instead, it used one of the FOIA’s exemptions to avoid scrutiny (BBC Legal Rights 2023). You have to wonder what the BBC is hiding, and why it will not reveal whether it monitors diversity when it comes to independent production companies, and if so how?

Periodically, the BBC invests in community affairs correspondents, of which I was one. While some might produce award-winning journalism (Tobbit 2021), the heft of responsibility, the ability to get under the skin, and the possibility of high-impact-change-led-data-driven-investigations are limited because of the barriers of programme decision makers. ‘They are tolerated, but aren’t embraced,’ said one current staff employee in network news (Anon 6 2024). The source continued: ‘They won’t get on the One, Six or Ten, because they’re fighting for space, and programme editors still see their role as providing cultural and exotic stuff, or forced marriage, stop and search or gang killings, not really getting under the skin of what’s happening today. They might make token slots on the News Channel or online, but not where they’re going to get noticed. Once the eye’s taken off that role, they’re quietly re-assigned, or they decide to go.’

In 2011, the BBC Trust published its review into its science coverage (BBC Trust 2011), with recommendations which still operate today. With all the above in mind, I have some suggestions:

  1. Training: the BBC Academy should offer training in connecting, creating and producing stories from communities of colour. I have been on two excellent courses which the BBC offers for free to my newspaper and local democracy reporters. The first was investigative journalism and the second was coding. Both lasted three full days. The University of East Anglia is the first higher education institution which runs a 12-week module in diversity and inclusivity in journalism. I would be delighted to help in the design and running of such a course for the BBC.

  2. Staffing: The role of ‘communities editor’ at local radio should be redefined to include and expect high-impact, change-led, data- driven investigative-journalism from communities of colour. This post should be embedded in the regional investigations units with the expectation of providing and producing stories which have real impact and start political debates which change public policy or create new laws. The BBC should also create a new role of UK communities editor, with a producer, whose role is to discover stories about the changing face of Britain aimed at the shows which set the news agenda.

  3. Critical friends: BBC Nations should resurrect the advisory councils. The aim is to embrace communities with people who can bring in stories the BBC is missing. The group should be made up of all the demographics for the communities of colour in that patch. It should be a meeting which generates ideas, so that the BBC can truly say: ‘You said, we did.’

  4. Leadership: BBC News and BBC Nations must provide a map and timeline of how it intends to produce leaders in decision-making posts who are given permission to speak unpalatable truths to power without consequences. It should devise a newsgathering strategy which plans for ‘big events’ such as sport, politics and breaking news.

  5. Defensiveness: BBC News and BBC Nations should consider how they can be more open and transparent to the idea that they are failing their communities of colour. They should consider recruiting non-executive directors with the gravitas and journalistic experience to be a second eye on complaints and programme ideas.

  6. Licence fee equality: Almost 24 million householders paid their licence in the fiscal year 2023-2024, almost £3.7 billion (BBC 2024). If one in five (18 per cent) is a household of colour then the corporation should spend a minimum of £660 million on content for licence-fee payers of colour. The BBC should carry out an independent academic audit of how it serves its communities of colour and quantify and justify whether it can truly say that the brown and black pound is equivalent to the white pound. It should carry out a survey of people of colour, ensuring demographic representation in terms of the protected characteristics (age, religion, gender, sexual orientation, social class and disability) to help determine funding for specific content among mainstream audio, video and digital platforms.

Conclusion

The BBC’s former interim head of the East Midlands region, BBC local radio manager and academic, Dr Liam McCarthy (2023), concluded that the corporation was institutionally racist. It is worth exploring how he came to his conclusion and engaging his services to help the BBC when it comes to portrayal. Without a paradigm shift, the corporation will continue to lose the trust and support of minority communities, something it has known about for a decade but ignored (Burrell 2014). The BBC lost a half million licence fee-payers who decided to opt for streaming services (Elliards 2024). The BBC decided to bury this news, as you might expect (BBC Media Centre 2024). Doing the same things over and again and expecting different results cannot lead anywhere. Now, with the Morrison-Banatvala review, there is an opportunity for real change.

This is an edited version of a submission made to the Morrison-Banatvala review which is looking ‘into how accurately and authentically the BBC portrays and represents different groups and communities across the UK’.

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Note on the contributor

Barnie Choudhury is an award-winning journalist who worked for the BBC for 24 years. He undertook roles such as reporting for radio and television, as well as output editing national radio and regional TV programmes. During his time at the BBC, Barnie was a community affairs and social affairs correspondent. He spent five years as a non-executive director for Ofcom, the broadcast industry’s regulator. Barnie is currently editor-at-large for the UK’s leading South Asian newspaper, Eastern Eye. As well as being a lecturer at the University of East Anglia, he is a professor of professional practice at the University of Buckingham.

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